Nice, but missing the point. The problem of a "catastrophic event" is not that global warming will kill us all. We can fix that. Well, maybe we can. What we can't fix is a piece of rock the size of Greater London falling on our heads and wiping out 90% of the life forms on the planet once more.
I am amazed that any company would be stupid enough to move manufacturing to China.
That one is simple: American companies rarely think beyond the next year, and CEOs often not beyond the next quarter, because it is always the next quarter (or two) that seem to matter. A CEO who willingly lets the next few quarters suck in order to have the company in better condition three, four years down the road would be sacked long before the ROI happened. Then his successor can bring in the harvest, while cutting costs/jobs, be lauded as a genius, take a big bonus and leave before it all falls apart.
The Inquisition and the Crusades had less to do with Christian/Catholic core beliefs,
Excuse me?
Funny how for all the bad things, it is never the religion that is the cause, even when the event in question is clearly religious in nature. No, of course that was all politics, has nothing whatsoever to do with the religion.
Start by accepting that the crusades, inquisition, witch hunts, various anti-jewish pogroms and many other evilness were caused by, supported by and at least actively operated by and through the christian faith.
Only when you've done that will you be taken seriously, and then you can proceed to outline how christianity has changed since then, accepting that this change wasn't caused from within, but by the outside force of reason, namely the renaissance and the enlightenment, and why through those changes a religion that is evil at its core (read the old testament, and no Jesus has not annulled it, by his own claims he only "completed" it, and besides it is still a part of the holy book, yes?) has been softened and dulled into something that is mostly tolerable.
The argument "waste their time" holds for an individual, or a small group. It doesn't hold for a government. It's a mistake often made, but a mistake nonetheless. You assume that the time and effort spent on this would otherwise be available for other tasks. If you look into the actual operative details, you will usually find out that it isn't. In this case, the religious police very likely would not make good tax collectors or even regular policemen.
Merely receiving a majority of the votes does not make a government legitimate by our rules; it also has to respect basic human rights.
Says who?
That's the thing. You can not at the same time claim that the majority is always right and that it has to follow rules. Who sanctioned those rules? It means you put an entity above the souvereignity of the people.
You can do that, don't get me wrong. In fact, I personally would strongly support it - democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But you have to be straight on your philosophy. Either the people rule, then their vote, no matter how much you may dislike it, is "right". Or there is a framework given from outside/above and the votes only allow options within that framework, in which case the people are not souvereign.
That is the old discussion about who started the violence and who should start with the stopping.
The social sciences have come a bit since the "an eye for an eye" days. Today we know how conflicts escalate, how self-sustaining patterns emerge, and - in part - how to resolve conflicts. One thing we know is that it is completely irrelevant who started and that the whole thing is a mesh of causality, not a singular cause-and-effect event. To every "if only you didn't, then..." the other side can always answer with a likewise "well, we only do that because you..."
Peace begins when both sides are so sick of the fighting that they find that having peace is more important to them than being right.
If they are just formula's around numbers, just give us the numbers. No need for all the fluff around it.
You're a geek. So am I, but here's a secret I learnt: Lots of people are afraid of numbers. Much in the same way they are afraid of punks - they don't really think they will harm them, but they prefer to have them accompanied by words/police.
Freedom. I do not think this word means what you think it means.
Or you. Try living in a country that is actively oppressed, where the supply of practically everything is subject to the whims of some outside force, which invades every now and then with military vehicles and just might shoot your friends, bulldoze your house, or yourself. Freedom gets a much more simple and immediate meaning there than "freedom of speech on the web". That's how the human mind works - you need to have your base desires satisfied before you start thinking about more abstract things.
No, seriously, I looked for the point, purpose, goal, meaning, whatever-you-want-to-call-it of this article, and I can't find one. You intend to do what by posting this? Wouldn't this blurb be much better as a Facebook wall posting?
I love how everyone who has no idea about governance thinks that the second you step beyond the barest minimum, you are in nanny state territory. Has none of you ever heard about shades of grey?
I think we sometimes forget the US is a lot like the EU..... the EU president would not be able to send help either if, for example, Greece's PM refused entrance.
Uh, no it isn't.
The EU president doesn't even have any troops to send. In fact, there is no such thing as "the EU president". Wikipedia:
President of the European Union (or President of Europe) could be an incorrect reference to any of:
* President of the European Council (since 1 December 2009, Herman Van Rompuy)
* President of the European Commission (since 22 November 2004, José Manuel Barroso)
* Presidency of the Council of the European Union (since 1 July 2010, Belgium)
Neither of them holds any executive powers. Especially the first two are administrative positions, basically the head organizers of their respective organisations.
Oh, look, someone has time-travelled in from the early 90s and is proud about this newfangled thing he calls "morphing". What a really new and creative idea.
Which is why places like Schleswig-Holstein, at 5% of the size of Nevada, have active plans to satisfy the entire electric energy demand of their entire population through wind power by 2020. Yes, that doesn't yet power cars, but that's just wind power as well.
Alternative energy isn't just one form, it's a combination of them all. And fuck the "it doesn't satisfy 120% of our demand" attitude. Do you always wait until you have a perfect and complete solution before you start implementing it?
If we had pushed stronger for alternative energy in the 70s, our use of oil and coal today would be considerably less than it is, which means we would require less, which means prices would be lower, less dangerous fields would be exploited and we'd have shifted peak oil out a decade or two. Heck, we may have even fought a war or two less over it. Yes, we likely wouldn't be living in Hippie paradise. But we would be having more alternatives, more options, and likely a better world.
Mostly nonsense. Unless you are doing some really insane crypto, work with embedded systems or have unusually high requirements (some realtime applications), the performance impact of security largely doesn't matter.
Security, especially in software development, doesn't suffer from the "we don't know how to do it" problem. It suffers from the "we don't have time/budget/patience/interest in doing what we know we should be doing" issue.
I think there needs to be a punishment clause. Bringing these people into compliance is one thing, but the way it played out in the past - do whatever you please until someone calls you out, then promise compliance and slowly and partially do something - means that the optimal strategy for a business is to try to get by without adhering to the GPL first, and only if that fails put some effort into compliance.
No surprise they act like that.
Everywhere else where people don't live in a dream world, there are punishments for this kind of behaviour that make sure the rational choice is the right one, because the punishment offsets any profit non-compliant behaviour could have gained you.
Please, some Linux contributor sue them. How about $5000 per device they distributed illegally? Hey, if it's acceptable damages for a single song, it certainly is acceptable for a piece of software.
It appears that here in Germany, we don't care much
That depends entirely on who you list in "we". If you dislike all those things, become a member of the Pirate Party and help change things. A lot of people here in Germany care, but like most of the western democracies, our politics has become a quagmire of lobbyism, stupidity and greed. It'll take some effort to change things, and that effort isn't whining on/.
In principle, or in our assumption of how much fucked up shit and blunders happen when they try?
I'm serious. Imagine you go shopping and a few armed assholes hold up the shop you're in. One of them is pointing a gun at you, and he's joking with his pal that he'd like to shoot someone, just for the fun of it. Fortunately, there's a whole squad of police officers also in the shop. Two of them are moving to arrest the guy holding up the shop keeper. Four are watching you and your potential murderer, but they refuse to intervene until he actually pulls the trigger.
A free people, in a free country, could easily go about choosing to purchase travel services from whichever entities they choose, and be subject to agreed upon security arrangements with those entities. Some airlines could specialize in extensive strip-searchy, genital-feely security theatrics, and some could specialize on a more distributed "hand every non-drinking passenger a little baseball bat as they board" approach. Then you could exercise your "right to feel" safe, while the rest of us exercise our rights, sans conflict.
Another idealist. Welcome to the real world, please make note of the location of the emergency exists, as you may have noticed, there are none.
Markets do not work that way except in textbooks. What more likely happens is that the vast majority of airlines would move in on some common ground that covers the majority of customers, and everyone else is left either with some special (and expensive) service, or with no options. More likely than not, the common ground wouldn't even be what the customer wants, but what they can make him believe he wants, and is cheapest.
Don't forget, had there been a Texan with a pistol on each of those airplanes on 9/11,
...the terrorists would've also had guns, and used them. Plus, if you've checked the statistics on accidents involving guns lately, you'd realize that we'd have several serious in-air firearm accidents a year.
So you'll gladly exchange some theoretical safety for the statistical certainty of several planes getting bullet holes punched into their airframes at 30,000 feet?
So does convicting someone of conspiring to commit a crime that never actually took place.
I hope you mean "because in the end they decided not to do it" and not "because the police stopped them".
Because man, I am happy that the police doesn't have to stand by and wait until a crime has actually happened. Prevention is as much a part of their job as investigation.
It's not about marketshare, it's about user numbers already declining.
That means people have tried the beta, and gone back to whatever they were using before. That is not a good sign, especially for the 50% or so that are going back to an older version of IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice, but missing the point. The problem of a "catastrophic event" is not that global warming will kill us all. We can fix that. Well, maybe we can. What we can't fix is a piece of rock the size of Greater London falling on our heads and wiping out 90% of the life forms on the planet once more.
I am amazed that any company would be stupid enough to move manufacturing to China.
That one is simple: American companies rarely think beyond the next year, and CEOs often not beyond the next quarter, because it is always the next quarter (or two) that seem to matter. A CEO who willingly lets the next few quarters suck in order to have the company in better condition three, four years down the road would be sacked long before the ROI happened. Then his successor can bring in the harvest, while cutting costs/jobs, be lauded as a genius, take a big bonus and leave before it all falls apart.
The Inquisition and the Crusades had less to do with Christian/Catholic core beliefs,
Excuse me?
Funny how for all the bad things, it is never the religion that is the cause, even when the event in question is clearly religious in nature. No, of course that was all politics, has nothing whatsoever to do with the religion.
Start by accepting that the crusades, inquisition, witch hunts, various anti-jewish pogroms and many other evilness were caused by, supported by and at least actively operated by and through the christian faith.
Only when you've done that will you be taken seriously, and then you can proceed to outline how christianity has changed since then, accepting that this change wasn't caused from within, but by the outside force of reason, namely the renaissance and the enlightenment, and why through those changes a religion that is evil at its core (read the old testament, and no Jesus has not annulled it, by his own claims he only "completed" it, and besides it is still a part of the holy book, yes?) has been softened and dulled into something that is mostly tolerable.
Typical mistake of personalisation.
The argument "waste their time" holds for an individual, or a small group. It doesn't hold for a government. It's a mistake often made, but a mistake nonetheless. You assume that the time and effort spent on this would otherwise be available for other tasks. If you look into the actual operative details, you will usually find out that it isn't. In this case, the religious police very likely would not make good tax collectors or even regular policemen.
Merely receiving a majority of the votes does not make a government legitimate by our rules; it also has to respect basic human rights.
Says who?
That's the thing. You can not at the same time claim that the majority is always right and that it has to follow rules. Who sanctioned those rules? It means you put an entity above the souvereignity of the people.
You can do that, don't get me wrong. In fact, I personally would strongly support it - democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But you have to be straight on your philosophy. Either the people rule, then their vote, no matter how much you may dislike it, is "right". Or there is a framework given from outside/above and the votes only allow options within that framework, in which case the people are not souvereign.
That is the old discussion about who started the violence and who should start with the stopping.
The social sciences have come a bit since the "an eye for an eye" days. Today we know how conflicts escalate, how self-sustaining patterns emerge, and - in part - how to resolve conflicts. One thing we know is that it is completely irrelevant who started and that the whole thing is a mesh of causality, not a singular cause-and-effect event. To every "if only you didn't, then..." the other side can always answer with a likewise "well, we only do that because you..."
Peace begins when both sides are so sick of the fighting that they find that having peace is more important to them than being right.
If they are just formula's around numbers, just give us the numbers. No need for all the fluff around it.
You're a geek. So am I, but here's a secret I learnt: Lots of people are afraid of numbers. Much in the same way they are afraid of punks - they don't really think they will harm them, but they prefer to have them accompanied by words/police.
Freedom. I do not think this word means what you think it means.
Or you. Try living in a country that is actively oppressed, where the supply of practically everything is subject to the whims of some outside force, which invades every now and then with military vehicles and just might shoot your friends, bulldoze your house, or yourself. Freedom gets a much more simple and immediate meaning there than "freedom of speech on the web". That's how the human mind works - you need to have your base desires satisfied before you start thinking about more abstract things.
and now you come to /. and whine because?
No, seriously, I looked for the point, purpose, goal, meaning, whatever-you-want-to-call-it of this article, and I can't find one. You intend to do what by posting this? Wouldn't this blurb be much better as a Facebook wall posting?
We don't need a nanny state.
I love how everyone who has no idea about governance thinks that the second you step beyond the barest minimum, you are in nanny state territory. Has none of you ever heard about shades of grey?
I think we sometimes forget the US is a lot like the EU..... the EU president would not be able to send help either if, for example, Greece's PM refused entrance.
Uh, no it isn't.
The EU president doesn't even have any troops to send. In fact, there is no such thing as "the EU president". Wikipedia:
President of the European Union (or President of Europe) could be an incorrect reference to any of:
* President of the European Council (since 1 December 2009, Herman Van Rompuy)
* President of the European Commission (since 22 November 2004, José Manuel Barroso)
* Presidency of the Council of the European Union (since 1 July 2010, Belgium)
Neither of them holds any executive powers. Especially the first two are administrative positions, basically the head organizers of their respective organisations.
Oh, look, someone has time-travelled in from the early 90s and is proud about this newfangled thing he calls "morphing". What a really new and creative idea.
Which is why places like Schleswig-Holstein, at 5% of the size of Nevada, have active plans to satisfy the entire electric energy demand of their entire population through wind power by 2020. Yes, that doesn't yet power cars, but that's just wind power as well.
Alternative energy isn't just one form, it's a combination of them all. And fuck the "it doesn't satisfy 120% of our demand" attitude. Do you always wait until you have a perfect and complete solution before you start implementing it?
If we had pushed stronger for alternative energy in the 70s, our use of oil and coal today would be considerably less than it is, which means we would require less, which means prices would be lower, less dangerous fields would be exploited and we'd have shifted peak oil out a decade or two. Heck, we may have even fought a war or two less over it. Yes, we likely wouldn't be living in Hippie paradise. But we would be having more alternatives, more options, and likely a better world.
touting Windows 7 Phone as the second coming of Zune.
There, fixed that for you.
Mostly nonsense. Unless you are doing some really insane crypto, work with embedded systems or have unusually high requirements (some realtime applications), the performance impact of security largely doesn't matter.
Security, especially in software development, doesn't suffer from the "we don't know how to do it" problem. It suffers from the "we don't have time/budget/patience/interest in doing what we know we should be doing" issue.
I take it that people who pirate content like music, games, movies also therefore deserve to be "punished"?
If they are building their business on it - absolutely.
For private use, yes it is illegal and yes, the fines issued currently are completely insane.
I think there needs to be a punishment clause. Bringing these people into compliance is one thing, but the way it played out in the past - do whatever you please until someone calls you out, then promise compliance and slowly and partially do something - means that the optimal strategy for a business is to try to get by without adhering to the GPL first, and only if that fails put some effort into compliance.
No surprise they act like that.
Everywhere else where people don't live in a dream world, there are punishments for this kind of behaviour that make sure the rational choice is the right one, because the punishment offsets any profit non-compliant behaviour could have gained you.
Please, some Linux contributor sue them. How about $5000 per device they distributed illegally? Hey, if it's acceptable damages for a single song, it certainly is acceptable for a piece of software.
It appears that here in Germany, we don't care much
That depends entirely on who you list in "we". If you dislike all those things, become a member of the Pirate Party and help change things. A lot of people here in Germany care, but like most of the western democracies, our politics has become a quagmire of lobbyism, stupidity and greed. It'll take some effort to change things, and that effort isn't whining on /.
That's where we differ, then.
In principle, or in our assumption of how much fucked up shit and blunders happen when they try?
I'm serious. Imagine you go shopping and a few armed assholes hold up the shop you're in. One of them is pointing a gun at you, and he's joking with his pal that he'd like to shoot someone, just for the fun of it. Fortunately, there's a whole squad of police officers also in the shop. Two of them are moving to arrest the guy holding up the shop keeper. Four are watching you and your potential murderer, but they refuse to intervene until he actually pulls the trigger.
That is the world you want to be living in?
A free people, in a free country, could easily go about choosing to purchase travel services from whichever entities they choose, and be subject to agreed upon security arrangements with those entities. Some airlines could specialize in extensive strip-searchy, genital-feely security theatrics, and some could specialize on a more distributed "hand every non-drinking passenger a little baseball bat as they board" approach. Then you could exercise your "right to feel" safe, while the rest of us exercise our rights, sans conflict.
Another idealist. Welcome to the real world, please make note of the location of the emergency exists, as you may have noticed, there are none.
Markets do not work that way except in textbooks. What more likely happens is that the vast majority of airlines would move in on some common ground that covers the majority of customers, and everyone else is left either with some special (and expensive) service, or with no options. More likely than not, the common ground wouldn't even be what the customer wants, but what they can make him believe he wants, and is cheapest.
Don't forget, had there been a Texan with a pistol on each of those airplanes on 9/11,
...the terrorists would've also had guns, and used them. Plus, if you've checked the statistics on accidents involving guns lately, you'd realize that we'd have several serious in-air firearm accidents a year.
So you'll gladly exchange some theoretical safety for the statistical certainty of several planes getting bullet holes punched into their airframes at 30,000 feet?
That's because any good web developer will check to see how their sites work in IE9 and then return to their browser of choice.
Those people don't show up on browser statistics of other places.
So does convicting someone of conspiring to commit a crime that never actually took place.
I hope you mean "because in the end they decided not to do it" and not "because the police stopped them".
Because man, I am happy that the police doesn't have to stand by and wait until a crime has actually happened. Prevention is as much a part of their job as investigation.
It's not about marketshare, it's about user numbers already declining.
That means people have tried the beta, and gone back to whatever they were using before. That is not a good sign, especially for the 50% or so that are going back to an older version of IE.